Flash is Not Dead Yet! HTML5 vs Flash

Posted On July 25, 2013

HTML5 is a term that has gone viral over the last few months.
Its arrival has put a question mark on the future of Flash. Debates have been going on about the future of flash and many have already considered flash as being dead.

It’s the Users for whom we develop. So, it does not matter whether you use HTML5 or flash because its the users who will use and all they want is best user experience. And flash has always been successful in giving its users a delightful experience.

From games to Apps, slideshows to video players, flash has delivered its content in the best way possible. Flash has always excelled in giving its developers the freedom to use their creativity beyond the limits. If you have a great experience on developing flash then leaving it, just because there is a new technology HTML5, is not justified. It’s the ability of the platform that we should care more about while choosing a tool for developing a world class UX for your audience. The experience for users should be engaging and rewarding.

Flash was first released in 1997, making it a 16 year old technology but on the other hand HTML5 is a new technology with a stable recommendation still to be released by the end of 2014. Only modern browsers have support for HTML5 and that too is not smooth across all browsers e.g. few features might be available on some browsers but not the other browsers. Whereas Flash is supported in nearly all desktop browsers and several android based devices. Nearly 95% of the browsers have flash support. There are over 100000 Flash games out there with nearly 2 billion users.

With Flash Player 11, a new feature was added named Stage3D. It uses GPU-based rendering to accelerate the game performance. With Stage3D you can now even develop 3D games for flash platform. To make game development process a bit more easy a number of game engines have already been written over Stage3D. Two such frameworks are Starling and Away3D. Starling uses Stage3D to develop 2D games whereas Away3D can be used to develop 3D games easily.

Adobe has also been working on FlasCC. With this you can compile your C/C++ games to flash. FlashCC also uses Stage3D. With FlasCC and Stage3D, there’s no question about the future of flash. They have even become even more better.

But do we mean that you should not use HTML5 and use Flash? No! we don’t mean that either. HTML5 has only given you one more option to consider while developing for web. Now you can choose from the two that suits your needs better. In the end, what matter is the UX and that user experience should be world class. So, if you believe you can deliver the best experience in flash, go for it. And so my belief still holds valid that Flash is Not Dead, Not Yet.

Note: The article is based on author’s opinions and certainly do not reflect Company’s position.

Suyash Mohan

7 Comments

The trouble is you are only thinking of web in terms of a laptop/desktop setting (mostly). Android and iOS do not have flash capability, nor will they, causing a severe hindrance on the practicality of what you state.

Although android and iOS does not have proper flash support, but still there is a large audience on laptops and desktops. In fact, maximum gamer and users are still on PC and Mac. Most of the top games on facebook are made in flash only.

Flash developers can compile their projects into Android, iOS and BB native apps through Adobe AIR! Flash is still better than HTML5 in many ways, except mobile browsers which we don’t really care. If you want to create a company profile website or ads banners, by all mean go for HTML5. We use Flash to create games and large scale enterprise applications. We care about performance, productivity, browser compatibility, user experience and development process. Only Flash can give us all of these.

Mobile sites on phones, from my experience, are garbage. The screen real-estate is too small, and the zooming/scrolling/resizing of the layout is very inconsistent and often unpredictable and error-prone, especially when the site is not tailored to a mobile platform. iOS is irrelevant; get a real operating system that supports Flash, like Windows 8 Pro and the rest of the universe outside of iOS. Even mobile Chrome supports Flash.

I’ve been programming since I was 9 years old, and I’m 30 now. Flash and ActionScript 3 DESTORY JavaScript, in every way imaginable. There is no comparison. JavaScript is very similar to ActionScript 2, but ActionScript 3 is in a league of its own. I’m just checking out the HAXE langauge, which is a “universal” language based on ActionScript, and can be compiled to JavaScript, C++, ActionScript, and more. It makes some very clever corrections too, like AS3′s Array and Vector. classes are now merged into a uniform Array and Array classes, which is much easier to remember. Constructor methods are named “new” for clarity. It also allows easy access to platform-specific features (it has top-level namespaces for various platforms, such as flash, cs, cpp, js, java, and neko) while abstracting many platform neutral features. With a single class, and simple compile file, I can output a functional swf in minutes, and the compiler will even inline functions. I can understand where people might want to use HTML5 for mobile penetration or to simplify certain layouts, but for complex applications and even some basic web sites, I would stick with Flash. It’s just so much faster and simpler to develop, supports pixel shaders, GPU acceleration, a very dependable event listener system, well-defined scoping, function closures, calling conventions, a single compressed deliverable to avoid the overhead of the hundreds of HTTP requests for assets, managing relative paths and file permissions that you’d need with HTML5, and with the right code, Flash can achieve just about anything on the screen. The new 3D APIs are just icing on the cake. It’s also easy to override the width/height properties of DisplayObject to decouple width/height from scale, and build docking frameworks where objects respond to the available space of their containers.

Triynko

October 2, 2013 at 9:42 pm

This thing stripped out less than/greater than symbols from my post, so assume those are equivalent to { and }. The post should read Array and Vector{Type} classes are now merged into a uniform Array{Dynamic} and Array{Type} classes.

Mike

January 9, 2014 at 3:26 am

I agree with a lot of what both this article and the above commentator have said but… they both miss the point. Support for HTML 5 is going up and Flash is going down, period. What the tipping point will be and when it will happen who knows. But will it happen? Yes!
Adobe has seen the writing on the wall and have already taken steps to ensure that as Flash grows it can produce out HTML5 solutions.
Lastly it is 2014 and HTML5 should be finalized going forward. This will be a big step and will start the universal adoption process. It will also spawn more tools to develop HTML5 and at its root isn’t that what Flash is, a development platform.
If I told you I had a development tool that offered all the connivence of Flash (tools, scriptability, performance, code correction, etc) but would create HTML5 compiled content. Hmm maybe you’d buy and try. Wish I did cause in 10 years I’d be mega rich. Thats my timeline till the need for a “Flash plugin” is gone, tick tock Adobe. Flash will live on as a Dev Plat that spits out HTML5.

It’s been 4 years since the infamous letter from Steve Jobs, but here we are still discussing Flash. Please just admit it that Flash is needed. If Steve Jobs’ (Apple’s) motivation was innocent, then it is time for flash to enter apple’s ecosystem, because it is proven that HTML 5 website is no lighter than SWF in terms of memory consumption or assets.

Just look at those image resources HTML 5 site have to use. They all use PNGs, minimal 5mb. i’ve seen a website that’s 20mb in total assets. Flash use PNGs that are rendered as JPGs.